“Geopolitics Has Become a Corporate Steering Tool”

The current world has little regard for the balance-of-power logic as observers understood it a quarter of a century ago. Only European Union countries still seem to pursue that kind of balance, in the manner of an old-fashioned “gentleman’s agreement”.

Until relatively recently, the only indicators typically taken into account in a business plan or executive committee were the projected financial return, the risk associated with the political system and the security of expatriates or employees sent into the field. At a more macro level, country analysis focused primarily on economic indicators and the risk of capital loss.

In 2026, the traditional key performance indicators — KPIs — are no longer sufficient to understand how a market is evolving or to steer corporate governance effectively, because they no longer capture what is actually happening on the ground. The world has changed and continues to change faster every year. Rivalries from the past are resurfacing and layering themselves on top of those that have emerged over the last twenty years.

The result is a hyper-fragmented world shaped by power struggles at both macro and micro levels. Social media also means that every crisis can quickly reverberate across other territories, even far from its original epicentre.

It is therefore becoming urgent to incorporate geopolitical KPIs in order to analyse the emerging world in greater depth and anticipate crises and tipping points more effectively.

For several years, I have been working on a theory designed to provide a better understanding of the way the world now functions as a whole and of the choices made by the most powerful states. I call it the “theory of geopolitical nodes”. It argues that power is no longer determined only by control of territory, but by control of the points where power relations, critical flows, dependencies and opportunities for disruption converge.

Straits, submarine cables, semiconductor plants, technology standards, cloud infrastructure and quantum capabilities are becoming arenas of power rivalry because disrupting them can generate systemic effects across the economy, security and sovereignty. These are geopolitical nodes.

For any company, regardless of size, it is now essential to define geopolitical KPIs both for performance management and for individual project monitoring. For example:

1.Dependency rate on a critical node. This measures the share of a strategic flow that passes through a single point of concentration. Examples include the percentage of a company’s supplies transiting through Taiwan or the Strait of Hormuz, dependence on a Chinese supplier, or reliance on a single hyperscale cloud provider. The higher the rate, the greater the company’s exposure to disruption and therefore to additional cost.

2.Node bypassability index. This assesses the ability to replace or bypass the node rapidly in a crisis. It can be measured through the number of available alternatives, switching time, additional logistics cost or loss of performance. A node becomes geopolitically dangerous when it concentrates an essential flow and the available alternatives are weak or non-existent.

3.Tension level around the node. This tracks the intensity of political, military, regulatory or economic rivalry surrounding the node: rising sanctions, more frequent naval exercises, tougher customs rules, growing cyber threats, export restrictions or regulatory changes.

These KPIs make it possible to anticipate the point at which a geopolitical node becomes a strategic breaking point and the executive must decide whether to activate the predefined Plan B.

This is a particularly important question because it sits at the heart of the practical challenges facing companies and their value chains. It will shape the future of European industry.

In French — and European — society, the word “sovereignty” is still closely associated with independence: industrial independence, independence in our defence system and independence in our strategic choices. I am among those who believe that sovereignty defined in this way has become something of a chimera.

For me, sovereignty is increasingly converging with strategic autonomy: the ability to limit the impact of dependencies on our strategic choices across every field — defence, security, healthcare, industry, renewable energy, IT and more.

It is a mistake to view sovereignty only through the prism of energy or defence. Every economic sector is shaped by dependencies, which are themselves geopolitical nodes that create leverage for influence and therefore limit the level of genuine independence.

I believe the very definition of “sovereignty” must now evolve and become more focused on strategic autonomy. To remain sovereign, we need to position our own levers of influence on geopolitical, economic and social points of friction and thereby create our own system of mutually beneficial “vassalisation”, in the commercial sense of the term.

That vision may sound cynical, but it has the advantage of reflecting realities on the ground outside Europe.

Sectoral sovereignties are therefore, in my view, simply additional chimeras. The real priority is to design long-term strategies that protect our industries and our ability to consume, with action plans that give us our own dependency mechanisms around the geopolitical nodes we control.

At European level, however, that would first require all member states to agree on a shared long-term strategy — at a time when major external powers are moving quickly to conclude bilateral agreements that may obstruct such a common approach.

For the detection and monitoring of KPIs, alert thresholds and tipping thresholds we discussed earlier, AI is an extraordinary tool, particularly in activation processes that must operate day and night. If the calculations are programmed properly, the time savings can be tremendous.

In that sense, AI appears to me as an enhanced tool for strategic judgement, but it will not replace the human brain in geopolitics because representations and interests are so profoundly human.

At the same time, excessive trust in AI and a lack of method can create bias with dramatic consequences. Tomorrow, anyone will be able to ask an AI system to produce a geopolitical analysis and feel certain that the result is high quality.

Because the profession of corporate geopolitical analyst is not yet standardised — something we are working on — many observers from highly respectable professional backgrounds nevertheless claim geopolitical expertise while already struggling to define the discipline itself and working without any particular methodology.

Many do everything possible to appear on television panels without presenting a clear analytical method or framework, and instead advance ideas based on their professional experience and personal perceptions. That is no longer enough.

Human judgement must retain responsibility for coordinating ideas, stakes and representations so that excessive biases do not produce flawed analysis. I often say that poor medical practice can kill people, whereas poor geopolitical practice can kill millions.

Based on the elements currently available, it is fairly easy to imagine the major powers becoming increasingly polarised around dependencies of every kind. Geopolitical nodes will become the very heart of global geopolitics — the support structures through which geopolitical power relations are exercised. Companies of every size will sit at the centre of those power relations, directly or indirectly.

The most likely scenario is that nation states remain the primary actors in geopolitics, combined with a bipolarisation of power around China and the United States. In my view, Russia, India and even the European Union will be more arenas in which consequences unfold than the principal decision-makers. The objective is to remain, or become, the world’s leading power, and in that contest the AI-quantum combination will be decisive.

I also believe that the concepts of deterrence and military power will lose some of their impact, in light of lessons drawn from the wars in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf, in favour of quieter strategies based on dependency and control of critical nodes. The military dimension will increasingly revolve around the AI-quantum-drone triad, while battlefields will become more diffuse.

Around this new bipolarity, unlike during the Cold War when each camp remained anchored in its own convictions, states will choose China or the United States on a more issue-by-issue basis. A multitude of temporary alliances will emerge and geopolitical reconfigurations will accelerate.

Taiwan will remain under constant pressure from Beijing, and the effectiveness of US measures designed to constrain Beijing will depend on Washington’s own ability to address its dependencies and on the effectiveness of political and economic mechanisms in the Indo-Pacific — including former TPP frameworks, IPEF and others.

Territories rich in rare-earth resources will be at the centre of global attention and concern: Greenland, eastern Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and others. This new geography of raw materials and critical minerals — lithium, cobalt, graphite and more — will be accompanied by a geography of dependency on industrial inputs such as sulphuric acid, water and hydrogen.

Ultimately, I believe the world of 2035 will foreshadow the second half of the twenty-first century, in which power relations layer themselves on top of one another, progressively eroding the notion of legitimate authority and allowing the idea of global power to emerge more strongly. Initiatives such as Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, intended to operate alongside the United Nations, will multiply, including at regional level, creating overlapping geopolitical interests for the states involved.

My first recommendation to European business leaders would be to stop believing that the end of a crisis means returning to the situation that existed before it. The famous “return to normal”, with petrol at €1.30 per litre, is a chimera. Territories will move from crisis to crisis in a form of “permacrisis” — an almost permanent state of crisis, regardless of its effects.

My second recommendation would be to integrate people into corporate structures whose role is to read and analyse these crises — their causes, their development and their consequences — so that companies do not fall behind on the global stage. German automotive groups and Anglo-Saxon groups in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia already have a head start in positioning corporate geopolitics this way.

Finally, I would advise leaders to move away from permanent short-termism, which prevents long-term thinking and destroys strategy. Executives will increasingly need to rely on five- or ten-year strategies, looking further ahead in order to secure their companies in a robust and sustainable way.